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UN food program changes
hands
By Thalif Deen
NEW YORK
- The United States-run Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) in Iraq takes control of billions of dollars in
Iraqi oil revenues beginning midnight on Friday when it
formally takes over the administration of the
seven-year-old United Nations-administered oil-for-food
program.
The UN program expires on Friday, and
the task of administering outstanding revenue and aid
programs now falls to the CPA. The UN has already
transferred US$3 billion from the program to the
CPA-managed Iraqi Development Fund (IDF), and will send
another $1.6 billion in outstanding revenue Friday.
Between December 1996 and the mid-March US-led
invasion of Iraq, the program exported $65 billion of
Iraqi oil and purchased $48 billion of commercial goods
for the civilian population, said Benon Sevan, head of
the UN Iraq program. The rest of the money went to pay
for UN weapons inspections, reparations dating from the
first Gulf War in 1991 and administrative costs.
US officials expect the transfer to be smooth,
and say that the recipients of the monthly market basket
- a dry assortment of cereals, grains, flour, tea,
sugar, cooking oil and soap - will hardly notice a
difference. "The public distribution system of a food
basket will continue through at least June 2004, so in
sum you're not going to see any change in this," Steven
Mann, the senior adviser to the CPA for the transition
of the oil-for-food program, said Monday. "What happens
after June 2004 with the public distribution system,
that's up to Iraqi officials themselves to decide at
that point."
In its "phasedown" prior to closure
on November 21, the Iraq Program, in coordination with
UN agencies and programs, the CPA and Iraqi authorities,
continued to identify and ship to Iraq approved and
funded priority items in a pipeline of humanitarian
goods and supplies valued at some $10 billion. As of
November 4, consultations between the CPA, Iraqi experts
and the UN had resulted in the prioritization of 3,168
contracts valued at more than $8.5 billion.
The
change in administration, though, has upset some people.
"The CPA has so far not inspired confidence that it can
do anything right, much less administer a massive
program of food aid to 25 million people," Jim Jennings,
president of Conscience International, told IPS.
Before the US-led attack on Iraq in March, some
893 international staff and 3,600 Iraqis worked for the
program. But since the bombing of the UN compound in
Baghdad in August, the UN has pulled out virtually its
entire international staff due to security reasons. The
CPA says that it will maintain most of the ongoing
projects - with Iraqi staff - and operations, eventually
turning them over to Iraqi authorities.
"This is
an enormous program with somewhere around $10 billion in
cash flow every year," Jim Paul, executive director of
the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS. Paul
said published reports have stated that the CPA has had
about $5 billion in oil revenues at its disposal since
it was established more than six months ago, but only $1
billion has been accounted for.
Last month, the
London-based charity ActionAid charged that $4 billion
was missing. Soon after, the CPA began publishing a
skeleton budget for the IDF online. It said it had
received only $1 billion from the oil for food program,
$1.4 billion from oil revenues since May and $200
million from seized Iraq assets in a US Treasury
Department fund. It added that $1.5 billion from seized
assets was put in the CPA's budget before the IDF was
created.
The program was established by the UN
Security Council in 1995 to relieve the humanitarian
crisis that followed the rigid sanctions imposed on Iraq
following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Under the
program, the UN used Iraqi oil revenues to purchase and
manage humanitarian assistance, supplies and projects.
These included buying and providing food, medicine,
water and electricity to Iraqis, as well as the
construction of schools, medical clinics and houses.
In financial terms, the program has been the
largest one the UN has administered in its 58-year
history. "It has also been one of the most efficient of
UN programs operating through nine agencies with a 2.2
percent overhead," the UN said in a statement released
Wednesday.
Paul of Global Policy Forum said that
having talked to senior UN officials, he got the
impression that no crisis will erupt immediately because
most Iraqis have received their food baskets, and some
of the food is already in the pipeline or in storage.
(Inter Press Service)
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